and still have fifty-one minutes before I’m timed out of this computer on the main floor of the Lawson-McGee Library, I will write.  today has been almost only false starts, so far, and they include: driving to Fountain City…where the library was closed and where I discovered I’d left my debit card at home after parking at Advance Auto Parts to buy oil.  So no oil.  Then I get home and give up on autos and decide to ride my bike to the downtown library, then realize my bike is still locked up on Samantha’s porch.  I walk to Samantha’s porch in shoes that only gave me blisters in the last half-mile or so.  I have a theory about all this.  a theory about how things going wrong is mostly only things going right.  I’m not exploding, I’m here, I’m cognizant.  I’m sensing some grace.

if some grace were to come, I would want to be able to recognize it, so I want nothing but to have all eyes and ears open to see it when it comes.  so far: three tomatoes were suddenly red this morning.  I have a job to apply for, and which I may be qualified to get.  this morning Mom emailed me photos of British libraries, which pulled on my soul a bit.  I had surgery a long time ago and only the scar and the bills remind me of that, what could potentially have happened. 

and then there are the graces that don’t have anything to do with me, that just are, that live independently of me and all my ideas of them, like the grey, stooped librarians who are bustling around all busines-like, and like the world of books.  after I do other things today, I’m going to read more Moby-Dick, which is only alright so far, but which is accelerating.  I find myself thinking of Nantucket, of Lowell, and of whales, twisting with the silence of space, spattered with the miscellany of the sea and the sun somehow piercing the surface and falling like gauze curtains in the breeze.  whales, I think sometimes, might be my secret muses.  I never dream about them but always wanted to, and I have never understood why a person can see a whale (drawing of, film of, photo of, outline of) and not be suddenly stilled because this is something we don’t understand.  or, I don’t understand.  how an animal the size of a building can be suspended in the sea, how we can see fish and say they’re swimming, not flying, because they’re obviously flying; the medium is only denser.  the whales are flying, maybe that’s why I don’t understand them.

but now I’m going to fill out the application and resume, since I’ve printed them just now and feel like I should go to a quiet corner to write in things like my expected salary ($0/hr), my college and degree, my references, whether I’ve been convicted of a felony.  and then, I shall saunter over to Union Street, where a hundred years ago the ladies walked in bustles and parasols underneath the clouds of smog, wondering what their lives meant.  I could do with a parasol, I think, on my way to the coffee shop, where I will do important things, like wonder what my life means.  on paper.  because I’ve suddenly got back all my desire to write and I have been writing like my house is on fire & a word will hoist out the window what it names and set it on the ground, unburned.  guh.  I wish I was better at everything.